Technology | The Guardian

We explore how our addiction to notifications and alerts influences how we use technology and go about our everyday lives

A teenager known online as Abu Sin is in custody after engaging in ‘unethical behaviour’ in live-streaming videos with California personality Christina CrockettA male Saudi Arabian teenager has been arrested in Riyadh over a series of online videos of conversations between him and a female Californian streaming-video star that went viral.

One of the best-selling toys of the 1980s has been resurrected by Wicked Cool Toys, which earlier this year also launched a revamped Cabbage Patch Kid dollChildren of the 1980s, rejoice! Teddy Ruxpin is back. The talking animatronic toy has been given a hi-tech makeover, swapping cassette tapes and plastic eyes for a 4GB hard drive and animated LCD peepers.Teddy has been resurrected by Wicked Cool Toys, which earlier this year also launched a revamped Cabbage Patch Kid doll. An early prototype of Teddy was showcased at the Dallas Toy Fair this week, although it’s not scheduled to launch until 2017. Continue reading...

A venture capitalist’s column for the Wall Street Journal has drawn outrage for suggesting women ‘obscure their gender’ online when applying for tech jobsA Wall Street Journal article encouraging women in technology to “create an online presence that obscures their gender” has drawn expressions of outrage and shocked disbelief from the community it purports to advise.Writing for a regular column dubbed “The Experts”, venture capitalist John Greathouse suggested that women should escape the gender bias that pervades the tech industry by pretending not to be women. Continue reading...

A prank video encouraging iPhone 7 users to drill a hole in their mobiles has gone viral this week. Suddenly my battered phone feels like a statementUnlike the viral prank video, I have not drilled a hole into the bottom left-hand corner of my iPhone, but you wouldn’t know that to look at it. The fascia, after being dropped on to hard concrete a few months ago, had a faint hairline crack across it, which after several more accidents spread outwards like the limbs on a tree until an entire chunk fell off, revealing the naked eye of the camera. Every time I look at it, it feels like staring into the face of a dystopian future. Continue reading...

A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition, available through Apple from Thursday, promises ‘a world of additional content’ including sigils, family trees and glossariesGeorge RR Martin has hailed “an amazing next step in the world of books” as he announced publication of a new digital edition of A Game of Thrones, featuring “a world of additional content” and an extract from the forthcoming sixth novel in his bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter.A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition was released on Thursday on Apple’s iBooks to mark the 20th anniversary of the epic fantasy novel’s first publication. It offers “a world of additional content”, said its publisher HarperCollins, ranging from interactive character maps to detailed annotations, character journeys and timelines, family trees and and audio clips. Continue reading...

A child-size robot designed to take on distinctly adult responsibilities takes the debate over the automation of human jobs to the next levelHumanoid robots were out of fashion at this year’s RoboBusiness, the annual exhibition in San Jose, California, that pegs itself as “the most important robotics event in the world”.Make your robot look and sound too much like C3P0, explained Ty Jaegerson of Savioke, and people’s “expectations of intelligence go up”. (Savioke’s robot, a hotel bot that delivers room service in hotels, instead resembles a slightly sleeker R2D2). Continue reading...

Users take to social media to vent their frustration with their BT Home Hubs and Amazon’s new voice-assistant speaker, which stalled on setupScores of BT broadband users who purchased an Amazon Echo intelligent voice-controlled speaker have run into frustrating setup issues, and vented their anger on social media at both Amazon and BT.

Matt Neil started compiling reports for the Football Manager game at the age of 15. After progressing from Truro City to Plymouth Argyle, his work was noticed by the League Two club and he was given a job as one of their football analystsBy Matt Stanger for The Set Pieces, part of the Guardian Sport NetworkAfter starting out as a researcher for Football Manager when he was just 15, Matt Neil’s eye for talent was picked up by Plymouth Argyle. He now works as the League Two club’s lead first team analyst, providing data on player performance, opposition reports and potential transfer targets. Here’s Matt’s story, as told to Matt Stanger:

Energy Technologies Institute argues small modular reactors capable of delivering clean power and heat could be in place by 2030 if the right policy framework is put in place, reports BusinessGreenThe first small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) could be operating in the UK by 2030 with the right government support, according to a new report from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

Olivier Grémillon says short-term rental websites are not to blame for housing crisis after criticism from MPs’ committee

As innovation stagnates and devices are kept for longer, smartphone makers and operators face each other in a battle over the phone as a service

Customers will be able to undo the software update that made printers reject third-party ink cartridgesHP has promised to reverse a software update which left printer owners unable to use third-party ink cartridges, apologising to customers for the lack of communication.The software update left printers rejecting ink cartridges that did not contain a security chip made by HP, even if the printer had previously accepted the ink cartridges and printed perfectly acceptably. Worse, the update appeared to fire on a time-delay: it was shipped in March, but ink cartridges were only rejected in September. Continue reading...

Nearly three months on since its release we’d like to know whether you’re still crazy to catch ‘em all

With EA Sports gearing up to release the latest edition of the big-money game ranchise, Fifa 17, we figured we’d try out our own motion-capture animations, celebrations and cut-scenes. Unfortunately none of our submissions were used in the final version

Editors told to get back to their Werther’s Originals after criticising ‘pathetic’ fashion bloggers ‘in borrowed clothes’They have ruled the fashion world for generations, but the formidable gatekeepers of Vogue have been branded “jealous, catty and hypocritical” by young fashion bloggers and fans after editors criticised the new breed of social media fashionista.

Paula’s son wants to try making YouTube videos. Should she find a good camera now, or start with a laptop or a smartphone?My son wants to start posting YouTube videos. Can you recommend a decent camera? It will be used for taking videos of himself talking. PaulaYou can use any of a vast range of devices to make YouTube videos. A laptop with a built-in webcam is probably the easiest option, but the obvious alternative is a smartphone. Most digital cameras can now shoot video as well. Continue reading...

Latest model’s 250-mile range will help ‘psychological barriers’ in drivers who fear running out of power, carmaker claimsRenault has unveiled a new electric car that it claims will overcome psychological barriers among drivers who fear running out of power between charges.

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Thursday. Continue reading...

Attorney general says he will amend the Privacy Act to ensure data published in anonymised formats cannot be reidentifiedGeorge Brandis will move to make it a criminal offence to publish or disseminate “reidentified” government datasets, in a move that digital rights groups say could criminalise important research and security work.The attorney general announced on Thursday that he would amend the Privacy Act to make it an offence to reidentify government data that had been published in anonymised formats. Continue reading...

Experts say the LendUp case is significant for firms in the emerging online ‘fintech’ sector that claim to offer a better alternative to payday loans

Swedish music-streaming service provider could acquire German rival, the Financial Times reports, amid competition with Apple and others to turn profitSwedish music-streaming service provider Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire German rival SoundCloud, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people briefed on the discussions.SoundCloud’s founders and investors were exploring strategic options for the company, including a sale that could value it at $1bn, Bloomberg reported in July, citing people familiar with the matter. Continue reading...

Two big Silicon Valley names are missing from the alliance, which aims to set societal and ethical best practice for artificial intelligence researchGoogle, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are joining forces to create a new AI partnership dedicated to advancing public understanding of the sector, as well as coming up with standards for future researchers to abide by.Going by the unwieldy name of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the alliance isn’t a lobbying organisation (at least, it says it “does not intend” to lobby government bodies). Instead, it says it will “conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology”. Continue reading...

Canadian company shifts focus to software having struggled to compete as mobile users opt for touchscreensBlackBerry is shutting down its phone business after 14 years of making handsets.The company’s devices were once the phone of choice for professionals, providing access to emails on the move, but BlackBerry has struggled to keep up with competition from rivals Apple and Samsung as mobile users increasingly opt for touchscreens. Continue reading...

Technology giant’s commitment to £8bn regeneration project is major boost, says chancellor Philip HammondApple is to move its UK headquarters to Battersea power station in a major boost for the £8bn regeneration of the Grade II-listed building – and a fillip for London following June’s Brexit vote.The technology company has agreed to take 500,000 sq ft of office space across six floors in the power station’s central boiler house. It will move 1,400 Apple employees into the building in 2021 from its eight other London offices. Continue reading...

Microsoft’s head of Xbox planning says 4K is a key part of gaming’s future, and insists customers will understand appeal of Project Scorpio when they see itMicrosoft was surprised and fascinated by Sony’s decision not to support 4K UHD Blu-ray discs with its PlayStation 4 Pro console, an executive has revealed.Albert Penello, who leads planning for the Xbox division, said that he expected Sony to feature a 4K disc player in its updated PS4 machine, which is launching on 10 November. Microsoft is supporting the format – which allows gamers to player UHD movies on their machine – in both its Xbox One S and Project Scorpio platforms. Continue reading...

A week after its release in the UK, readers tell us what they think about the virtual reality system Oculus Rift

The Anti-Defamation League has included the cartoon to its Hate on Display list after it was adopted by white supremacists this yearPepe the Frog, a green frog with red lips created by cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005, has been labelled an “online hate symbol” by the Anti-Defamation League after his adoption as an icon of the white supremacist movement.“Images of the frog, variously portrayed with a Hitler-like moustache, wearing a yarmulke or a Klan hood, have proliferated in recent weeks in hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter,” the ADL said, explaining its decision to add the meme to its online Hate on Display database. Continue reading...

Short on single-player campaign but long on loot collection and exploration, new expansion of first-person shooter ticks most boxes – but might not win new playersBy now, you know what Destiny is: a hybrid first-person shooter and massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, it throws players into a vast space opera as they fight four alien races to defend an embattled future Earth on the verge of collapse.Or more reductively, you play as a space wizard and shoot aliens in the head to get cool new guns and make numbers go up. Continue reading...

As writers learn that tech giant has processed their work without permission, the Authors Guild condemns ‘blatantly commercial use of expressive authorship’When the writer Rebecca Forster first heard how Google was using her work, it felt like she was trapped in a science fiction novel.“Is this any different than someone using one of my books to start a fire? I have no idea,” she says. “I have no idea what their objective is. Certainly it is not to bring me readers.” Continue reading...

With EA Sports gearing up to release the latest edition of the big-money football computer game franchise, Fifa 17, we figured we’d try out our own motion-capture animations, celebrations and cut-scenes. Unfortunately none of our submissions were used in the final version

Sony are hoping to buck the trend of flagging VR sales with its new console , while Deus Ex proves there’s life yet in the dystopian gaming genreIf you did your growing up in the 20th century, the chances are your youthful predictions for 2016 would have involved colonies on the Moon, flying cars and friendly, subservient robots. Although these visions of ultra-modernity are sadly yet to be, we can always console ourselves with the fact that at least we’ll all soon be using virtual reality, gaming’s holy grail, which has been tantalisingly out of reach since its initial appearance in the early 90s. But this month even that small piece of future-certainty looked questionable with news that, in the US, sales of Oculus Rift (£549), the Facebook-owned technology that re-sparked interest in VR, and HTC Vive (£799), its technically superior rival, had both ground to a halt. PC gaming platform Steam showed a 0% growth for Vive and a 0.01% increase in Oculus Rift ownership last month, a possible indication that early adopters have got theirs, and everybody else is waiting for some decent games and a price reduction.Related: PlayStation boss: virtual reality throws out the game-design rule book Continue reading...

Who are the people writing the thousands of ‘fair and unbiased’ reviews? Do they get paid? Not quiteFake reviews on Amazon can’t be trusted as they’re biased, or at least that’s what recent reports claim. But who are the people behind these thousands of reviews, how did they get into it all and are the so-called incentivised reviews really fake?

We need better language to describe the technology companies that control the digital worlds in which we speak, play and liveGoogle and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power.

SpaceX founder tells meeting of astronautical experts that his only purpose is to ‘make life interplanetary’, revealing plans for reusable ship to MarsSpaceX founder Elon Musk has outlined his highly ambitious vision for manned missions to Mars, which he said could begin as soon as 2022 – three years sooner than his previous estimates.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk describes his highly ambitious vision for manned missions to Mars at a conference in Mexico. ‘The key is making this affordable to almost anyone who wants to go,’ he says. The first flights would be ‘fairly expensive’ but ticket prices could later drop to as little as $100,000. One day he hopes the transport system will give ‘full access to he entire greater solar system’ once refuelling stops are established Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Wednesday. Continue reading...

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s project to colonise Mars, has released a video demonstrating his hopes for space travel. Musk has said that he wants to make it possible for ‘anyone who wanted to go’ to Mars to be able to get there but predicts it could take between 40 and 100 years to establish a large colony of people. The new rocket involved in this would be the largest in history. Continue reading...

After details of the infidelity website’s 33m members were leaked online, Rob Segal and James Millership had a job on their hands to salvage the damaged brandCan Ashley Madison shake off her bad reputation? “We talk about her as Lindsay Lohan,” says Rob Segal, chief executive of Ruby, the company behind the infidelity website hacked last year. “People are interested in her good and bad.”People are definitely interested in her. Despite last year’s calamitous security breach which saw the confidential account details of 33 million members of the site – which used the slogan “Life is short. Have an affair” – leaked online, it attracted close to 5 million new subscribers in the months that followed. Continue reading...

Six lawmakers question why it took Yahoo two years to discover breach as experts warn of the implications of the record-breaking haul of password data

Court hearing follows arrest of man in Northamptonshire over alleged hacking and theft of 3,000 imagesThe Duchess of Cambridge’s sister has taken high court action against a “person or persons unknown”.Pippa Middleton is listed as the claimant in a case to be heard in London on Wednesday. The case is listed as “Middleton & anr v The Person or Persons Unknown”. Court officials identified the claimant as Pippa Middleton but gave no indication of what the case was about. Continue reading...

Scientists create polymer sheets that can be programmed to change shape over time, which could be used to make the next generation of medical implantsThe delicate flower bud bursts into life, opening layer after layer of brightly coloured petals, first large and red, then small and purple, and finally the innermost ones - tiny and orange.But as convincing as the bloom may seem, it is not a work of nature. Scientists created the flowering bud after learning how to make polymer sheets that can be programmed to change shape over time.

From the must-have big names to the quirky indie games, here are some of the treasures we found at the UK’s biggest games eventThousands of people filled the halls of the NEC in Birmingham for this year’s EGX to play hundreds of new and unreleased games. While a few big names had an appropriately big presence, the indie-themed Rezzed zone was bigger than ever, and the quirky Leftfield Collection – as always – boasted some of the most interesting games on show. Here are our favourites of all shapes and sizes. Continue reading...

National data protection authority blocks recent privacy changes made by social network and commands existing shared data and phone numbers be deleted for 35 million usersThe German data protection agency has ordered Facebook to stop collecting user data from its WhatsApp messenger app and delete any data it has already received.The social network announced in August that it would begin sharing data from its 1 billion-plus user base, including phone numbers, from WhatsApp users with Facebook for the purpose of targeted ads. It gave users the option of opting out of the data being used for advertising purposes, but did not allow them to opt out of the data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook. Continue reading...

The SpaceX founder has become the face of entrepreneurial space exploration – and ambition. What does the established space science community think of him?Entrepreneur Elon Musk has set himself an ambitious timeline for the colonization of Mars. The South Africa-born magnate estimates that his private space company, SpaceX, will launch its first manned mission in 2024 – one decade sooner than Nasa’s ambitions.Musk will grace the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, unveiling his plans to send humans to Mars in a keynote talk titled Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species. He will outline what SpaceX deems to be a “good approach” for establishing a city on the red planet. Continue reading...

Financial backing of pro-Trump trolls causes rift with VR games developers as Palmer Luckey attempts to backtrackDevelopers of virtual reality games are pulling their support for Oculus after the involvement of its co-founder Palmer Luckey in a pro-Trump and anti-Clinton group was revealed.

Deep learning needs to become more efficient if it is going to move from using data to categorise images of cats to diagnosing rare illnesses“Is data the new oil?” asked proponents of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, and the rise of big data’s turbo-powered cousin deep learning, we had become more certain: “Data is the new oil,” stated Fortune.Amazon’s Neil Lawrence has a slightly different analogy: Data, he says, is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. A Devonian ironmonger, Newcomen built his device to pump water out of the south west’s prolific tin mines. Continue reading...

TV and MLS have played a part in popularizing the beautiful game Stateside, but video games’ influence on the American soccer fan cannot be underestimatedFor Kelvin Garcia, growing up in a Dominican family from New York City meant two sports took priority. “As a Latino kid in the Bronx, all I ever played was basketball and baseball,” says Garcia, who now lives in Texas. As a boy, soccer was barely on Garcia’s radar. He remembers working at a sports camp with European counselors during the 2010 World Cup and wondering what the excitement was about. As a basketball fan, he was more interested in whether LeBron was going to the Knicks.Nowadays, Garcia cannot go a day without talking about his love for Antonio Conte’s Chelsea and their title chances. Continue reading...

Google is old enough to drink, buy cigarettes and vote in the UK. But does it know its date of birth?What’s that Google? It’s your 18th birthday today? Happy birthday Google! You’re now old enough to drink in Britain. Though the existence of Google Plus suggests you’ve been quietly breaking that law for a while now.Sorry to nitpick though, but are you sure it’s your birthday? Only, there’s been some confusion over that in the past. Right now, on 27 September, you have one of your merry “Google doodles” up on your homepage wishing yourself a happy birthday (also, Google, that’s a little sad? Are you OK? Normally we rely on our friends to wish us a happy birthday rather than buying our own cards). Continue reading...

The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday. Continue reading...